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Lightspark's Advanced Graphics Engine Progresses

09-25-2010, 04:10 PM

Phoronix: Lightspark's Advanced Graphics Engine Progresses

For those interested in the state of the "advanced graphics engine" for Lightspark, the newest and promising open-source project to implement support for Adobe's Flash/SWF specification, there's an update. This graphics engine is progressing, according to Alessandro Pignotti, the lead developer of Lightspark...

I'm holding out for Hulu support. Then I can kick that Adobe plugin to the curb.

It's funny how an Adobe developer will rant about how terrible and hard it is to write a Linux plugin with acceleration but they apparently have no problem supporting some new IE9 specific acceleration technique.

I understand that both IE and Windows have the market share and it makes sense to support them well. I just think they should come out and say that is their strategy instead of making excuses.

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Hulu will never be supported, because it's all encrypted. If the OSS community ever cracks that, they'll just move on to some other form of encryption.

Bullshit. Spotify ("uh-huh") works on Wine, which has support for encryption. That means that Wine doesn't crack, but supports encryption. I could, if I wanted to, simply record my soundcard in Linux when I run Spotify. 20 hours per month all I can eat music at no charge!

Spotify is aware of this and even supports Linux, which can't even encrypt soundcard output.

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Hulu will never be supported, because it's all encrypted. If the OSS community ever cracks that, they'll just move on to some other form of encryption.

Encryption algorithms are well known and source is available. It doesn't lessen their effectiveness. It's why you can use standard encryption instead of rolling your own which is a difficult, time consuming, process.

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What i'm saying, is that Flash has a secret key, just like blu-ray players have special keys, which allow them to decrypt content. The only way to support encrypted flash is to reverse-engineer that key, which i'm sure is possible but not likely to happen anytime soon because not many people really care.

If i'm wrong about how the flash encryption works, and it really is just a matter of supporting a standard method of decryption then let me know. But links please, because i'm almost certain i'm right.

Looks to me the cat is already out of the bag. The reason Adobe is throwing the DMCA card at tools like rtmpdump is because their purpose is to save the stream to disk.

I don't see why Gnash or Lightspark can't implement playback as long as they stick to the model Adobe's player uses. 1) Use the SWF pushed out by the content provider and 2) store the stream in memory long enough to play it and then discard it. (Don't break the presentation and don't be a recording tool.)

The key you speak of is generated by the flash player using a "well-known industry standard cryptographic primitives consisting of Diffie-Hellman key exchange and HMACSHA256."

Looks to me the cat is already out of the bag. The reason Adobe is throwing the DMCA card at tools like rtmpdump is because their purpose is to save the stream to disk.

Cool. So i was right and there is a magic key they use, it's just that it's already been reverse engineered and so it can be used. If they do use it, then i would expect the next version of flash to change and Hulu would break again, but that's just the way DRM goes these days.

Do you know what their stance on implementing stuff that would violate the DMCA is? I'm not sure if GNU purposefully avoids that or not.